Is This Normal?
Whether a quiet teenager is a worried-about teenager, what the professional threshold actually is, and what the widely quoted numbers do and do not mean.
8 pages in this section.
Most of these pages end up saying some version of the same thing, which is that the range of ordinary is wider than it looks from inside your own house. Where that is not the answer, the page says so plainly and tells you what the actual threshold is.
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Is My Teenager Shy, or Is It Something More?
The agency that studies this says shyness is not the disorder, and its own survey found only 12 percent of shy young people ever met the criteria. Here is what the line is made of.
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How Common Is Social Anxiety in Teenagers?
The widely quoted prevalence figure is a lifetime estimate under older criteria from a survey fielded in 2001 to 2004, and the severe impairment number beside it is 1.3 percent.
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What an Ordinary Amount of Social Struggle Looks Like
Quiet at the start of things, one or two friends rather than a crowd, a group that splits and takes months to replace. What is ordinary, and what the actual threshold is made of.
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When Your Teenager Will Not Talk to Anyone
Not talking to you is one question. Not talking to anybody is a different one, and it splits into four situations with four different answers. How to work out which one you are looking at.
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Social Anxiety or Autism, and Why That Question Is Usually the Wrong One
The fork most comparison pages offer is not really there, because the same behaviour fits either description and a teenager can be described by both. What an assessment attends to instead, and what to ask when you make the call.
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NICE says a significant number recover before adulthood, and in the same paragraph says recovery without treatment is modest once it has carried into adult life. Both halves, and no invented percentage.
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The Avoidance a Parent Can Actually See
Most pages describe what social anxiety feels like inside, which a parent cannot see. This one describes what avoidance looks like from across the room, and what to write down.
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When Avoiding One Class Turns Into Avoiding School
It widens gradually, not all at once. What to record, what federal regulation actually says about school support, and what the guidelines do and do not contain about residential placement.